They lead this article with “one view of complexity that holds that it is largely a bad thing- that simplification generally creates value by removing unnecessary costs”. Certainly we all yearn for a more simplified life, structure, organization, approach to systems or just reducing complexity in our daily lives to find time for what we view as improving its ‘quality’.

Within the article they argue there are two types of complexity – institutional and individual.

The former concerns itself with the interactions within the organization, the latter is the way individuals or managers deal personally with complexity.

The real important take away from this article for me was when organizations treat complexity as something they must overcome, reduce or try to ignore they miss opportunities. Complexity, the authors argue, should be seen as a challenge to be managed, managed well, and its full potential exploited, not as a problem to be reduced or eliminated. It is through the nature of these complexities we achieve competitive advantage and can exploit more of the flow of knowledge for those new sources of new profit and wealth creation.

They suggest organizations need to decide on where to hold complexity within any design and build the right capabilities where they matter. I would argue innovation certainly matters, and it is complex and needs to be understood as exactly that, and managed accordingly not in piece meal fashion. Complexity matters in building the right processes, skills and culture but because they don’t behave in linear ways and any ‘messing’ with the complexity and relationships within this can have an awful lot of unintended consequences.

We have choices of complexity

There are different types of complexity to manage. Work conducted by Julian Birkinshaw and Suzanne Heywood suggested four types of complexity. I only summarize these here.  Imposed complexity, those interventions both internally and externally that require ‘higher’ insight. There is the inherent complexity found with any organization and presently managed through striving to be more efficient and effective. There is designed in complexity, where innovation needs to fit more. These are choices about how, where and why an organization sets about its operation. These can be constrained, under invested in, even jettisoned but do have lasting consequences for the future of the organization. This is the area of strategic consequence as these can limit competitive advantaged from the level of innovation intensity chosen as an example. The fourth is unnecessary complexity where increased misalignment resides, it is sometimes easy to recognize but often hard to let go as it sometimes makes up “the way things are run around here” and have a richness in history.

The challenge of complexity within innovation

If you can begin to identify complexity that hampers effectiveness you can begin to remove it. What you have to be very clear upon is having a complete understanding, or a well informed one on all the effects if the complexity part you are removing is not the route to value and often innovation. The more creative side certainly does get constrained and caught up in this often shorter term pursuit of effectiveness for effectiveness sake and you suddenly don’t have the bandwidth for innovation exploration and more.

Do recognize that innovation is complex, recognize it does have to be handled carefully but it needs to also be fully understood for what it is, a complex adaptive system. It cannot be treated in the same way as effectiveness or efficiency can. It  needs ‘actively’ managing differently, for all the future opportunities it holds by placing the emphasis on building greater innovation capabilities to make it ‘dynamically’ work. Otherwise you end up with unexplained consequences to poorer performance from your innovation activities and often at a loss to explain why.

We do need to relate more to complexity as it comes with the turf if you want really lasting innovation.

The post Cracking the complexity code first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

A truly integrated innovation solution that sits in our organization to allow innovation to be fully leveraged and exploited.

We need to recognize innovation has many touchpoints and a myriad of dimensions that need to be aligned and integrated. I genuinely believe we need a solution provider, who takes a more holistic view of innovation management that can make a significant advancement on where we are today, in our processes and systems.

These need a total integrated solution as the approach. this has its complexities in the challenges but we do have the potential through technology deliveries, platform constructs, and using the flexibility and adaptability found in the cloud.

If we combine these technology enablers with our innovation management understanding, then we can begin to construct this systematically and thoughtfully. It is very achievable and necessary for our organization’s abilities to absorb and translate knowledge into innovative growth, something missing for many.

Innovation is certainly one of those in need of a real concerted effort to bring our approach to the management of innovation up to date within our enterprises, to make it more inclusive and that can I believe come far quicker through delivering it across the organization and all their partners by operating within the cloud.

An Enterprise Innovation Process (EIP) that is highly visible, agile and core to the organization’s future, seen by all, used by all and truly valued by all, as integrated and highly valuable to engage with.

The formal management of innovation is not resolved today, it is a collection of pieces.

To quote these statistics from an Innovation Leadership Study in March 2012 for example:
• *Only 30% of respondents agree they have an effective organisational structure for innovation.
• *45% do not have a well‐defined governance structure for innovation.
• *40% lack clear roles and responsibilities for innovation.
• *39% state they do not have an effective decision‐making process for innovation.
• * 54% of those surveyed indicate they do not have a formal KPI system for promoting innovation.
• *49% are not having a well‐defined process to prioritize and allocate time and funding to innovation projects.

If innovation management can be integrated into the organizations systems, I would suggest many of the current problems and frustrations we face today, in our innovating efforts, in barriers and issues surrounding innovation, might begin to melt away or change the existing unsatisfactory result game of today.

We need to strive towards making a more radical attempt at integrating innovation into our systems and structures. It is needed, as we need to all engage through innovation far more, to tackle growing issues and problems that are complex challenges that really need integrative thinking and connected processes.

Making the business case

Innovation management today is often standing outside any integration structure.  Some people, I am sure, would argue that it should do, yet I do often see and certainly feel innovation is often missing the critical top management line of sight and suffers accordingly.

Often this is in numerous resource constraints that ate becoming a real performance drag against expectations. To resolve this and many other issues innovation needs to be more central in core process thinking and managing throughout the entire organization.

• Often Innovation runs counter to repeatable processes; it needs to leverage this ambidexterity of having access to all that makes it adaptable‐ nimble, agile, constant change, and experimentation, prototyping tailored to explore incremental innovation in faster, more flexible ways.

• Alongside this to allow for more radical innovation that taps into greater needs for mobility, usability, elasticity and yet still be aligned to leverage, exploit and maximise opportunities needs to run in parallel.

We need not just a new innovation management system; we need to build this on a modern engagement platform. As constant change happens we will need to accommodate new technologies and its realization of enterprise value will need an even greater evolution than ERP, the present backbone of organizations.

We need a new outward-focused orientated system that can be delivered through this suggested Enterprise Innovation Planning (EIP) system.

As outlined earlier here, to achieve this I think we must go cloud‐based, agile, and moving towards having a more ambidextrous organization design for innovation.

This will help innovation to break out of the existing constraints and linear approach we have given it as its present straight jacket.

Integrating the innovation process and system is needed more today than ever.

We are in a really evolutionary period, with the explosion of change taking place in the post‐digital world of cloud, big data, social and interconnected devices. External insights and Intelligence will not become Enterprise knowledge that flows without real, deep integration.

Receiving the knowledge alone will not turn these into ‘higher scales, richer, more innovation business outcomes’ that have real growth value, unless we realize the massive ‘mismatch’ between digital flowing in and the physical attempting to cope with this.

The discovery of insights from all this embedded intelligence, social activity and data analytics is leading us to potentially manage a significant wave of new innovation opportunities from this growing digital knowledge and activity.

Insights and ideas will form a real log jam attempting to enter the innovation pipeline

As it stands I can see a potentially damaging build‐up, or a log jam of promising concepts all desperately trying to work themselves through the innovation funnel.

Either decisions or the existing disciplines have to be radically altered, where we take on a much higher risk profile to enable these to move from idea to finished product or new service, or we accept the consequences of different failures, growing frustrations or variable revenue metrics against the cost invested.

The innovation pipeline today is very manual; it will always need human intervention, in decisions, in inputs, in what is communicated, and what is approved or dropped. Yet innovation often gets far too weighed down by the wrong type of human intervention.

What changes are needed, who will be willing to invest in this radical redesign of the innovation system?

It is through searching for and seeking engagement in the ‘wider’ world we will begin to make greater connections and receive potentially enormous amounts of (raw) data, about interactions, performance, possible issues and connecting that previously fragmented and dispersed information, through analytics so it can be turned this into emerging valuable knowledge.

Innovation needs a radical redesign and update to accommodate the changes occurring in the present digital evolution of mobility, social and big data.

• We will need to transform much within our systems but more importantly to orientate our skills to receive, translate and diffuse new knowledge, in significantly different ways.

• It is through this combination of people and ‘things’ connecting into our businesses that we will be able to extract new observations, to give us insights that can lead to completely different innovation opportunities.

• Market trends are changing faster and becoming shorter, so opportunity windows are narrowing. Risks of missing out are constantly increasing for those who are not focusing intently on that critical ‘time to market’ and not constantly streaming their innovation system, looking to automate it where ever they can.

Today we are still too reliant on manual systems for much of our innovation work.

What is needed is to push the thinking on how to automate the innovation process even more.

We need to think about our innovation system designs a whole lot deeper to allow these new digital technologies and the insights to be worked through the innovation process.

Speed is becoming ever more important, for new solutions to be turned out to the other end as new innovations.

We need to design a complete innovation system otherwise we will be investing in a front-loaded area alone, limiting digital impact and that will not deliver the power of actual growth expected or needed from our innovation activities so as to deliver new valuable outcomes.

Approaching the innovation process holistically would certainly help instead of bolting further onto our present ways as our innovation challenges become even more complex.

Offering an Enterprise integrated solution would really offer innovation and its management a real opportunity to become fully embedded within our organizations.

Innovation gains a real line of sight and across organizational engagement to move closer to its promise of delivering sustained growth, new business and impact.

So it would be a real achievement if we saw real hard physical evidence that innovation was moving towards this integrated system in 2015, so our Enterprises can leverage all the knowledge and insights that can be harnessed into new innovation growth.

The post My innovation wish for 2015 first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

They lead this article with “one view of complexity that holds that it is largely a bad thing- that simplification generally creates value by removing unnecessary costs”. Certainly we all yearn for a more simplified life, structure, organization, approach to systems or just reducing complexity in our daily lives to find time for what we view as improving its ‘quality’.

Within the article they argue there are two types of complexity – institutional and individual.

The former concerns itself with the interactions within the organization, the latter is the way individuals or managers deal personally with complexity.

The real important take away from this article for me was when organizations treat complexity as something they must overcome, reduce or try to ignore they miss opportunities. Complexity, the authors argue, should be seen as a challenge to be managed, managed well, and its full potential exploited, not as a problem to be reduced or eliminated. It is through the nature of these complexities we achieve competitive advantage and can exploit more of the flow of knowledge for those new sources of new profit and wealth creation.

They suggest organizations need to decide on where to hold complexity within any design and build the right capabilities where they matter. I would argue innovation certainly matters, and it is complex and needs to be understood as exactly that, and managed accordingly not in piece meal fashion. Complexity matters in building the right processes, skills and culture but because they don’t behave in linear ways and any ‘messing’ with the complexity and relationships within this can have an awful lot of unintended consequences.

We have choices of complexity

There are different types of complexity to manage. Work conducted by Julian Birkinshaw and Suzanne Heywood suggested four types of complexity. I only summarize these here.  Imposed complexity, those interventions both internally and externally that require ‘higher’ insight. There is the inherent complexity found with any organization and presently managed through striving to be more efficient and effective. There is designed in complexity, where innovation needs to fit more. These are choices about how, where and why an organization sets about its operation. These can be constrained, under invested in, even jettisoned but do have lasting consequences for the future of the organization. This is the area of strategic consequence as these can limit competitive advantaged from the level of innovation intensity chosen as an example. The fourth is unnecessary complexity where increased misalignment resides, it is sometimes easy to recognize but often hard to let go as it sometimes makes up “the way things are run around here” and have a richness in history.

The challenge of complexity within innovation

If you can begin to identify complexity that hampers effectiveness you can begin to remove it. What you have to be very clear upon is having a complete understanding, or a well informed one on all the effects if the complexity part you are removing is not the route to value and often innovation. The more creative side certainly does get constrained and caught up in this often shorter term pursuit of effectiveness for effectiveness sake and you suddenly don’t have the bandwidth for innovation exploration and more.

Do recognize that innovation is complex, recognize it does have to be handled carefully but it needs to also be fully understood for what it is, a complex adaptive system. It cannot be treated in the same way as effectiveness or efficiency can. It  needs ‘actively’ managing differently, for all the future opportunities it holds by placing the emphasis on building greater innovation capabilities to make it ‘dynamically’ work. Otherwise you end up with unexplained consequences to poorer performance from your innovation activities and often at a loss to explain why.

We do need to relate more to complexity as it comes with the turf if you want really lasting innovation.

The post Cracking the complexity code first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Maybe I’m taking on more than I can chew here but I’m going to attempt to explain why innovation can be so complex and requires an adaptive system.

I apologise if it does not work for you, or you simply just give up on this but I am going to try to explain innovation as a complex adaptive system.

Why- I like the pain involved!  I’m certainly not in any shape or form an expert or even that much of a student of complex systems, and what it fully consists of, but I do need to explore this more, and a little shared pain helps in this as I go.

This issue is one that I consistently come across many references to innovation being a complex system. The trouble is I’ve never been fully clear on what determines the make up a complex system for innovation. I’m not sure anyone does for complex systems either!

So my aim here is to establish a direct and clear set of links across innovation and complexity without it involving me in ploughing through incredibly ‘dense’ academic papers on this subject.

It is amazing how Wikipedia is becoming rapidly the first call of reference, is it because it takes away all this density found in academic papers, or that the academic papers are written mostly for an informed group and for those of us, obviously sitting on the outside of this ‘elite’ group, we gravitate to where we seem welcome to gain a ‘reasonable’ and quick understanding. So this is my starting point.

Irrespective our starting point has to be definitions

So borrowing from Wikipedia  let’s define:

A complex system is a system composed of interconnected parts that as a whole exhibit one or more properties (behaviour among the possible properties) not obvious from the properties of the individual parts.

A system’s complexity may be of one of two forms: disorganized complexity and organized complexity. In essence, disorganized complexity is a matter of a very large number of parts, and organized complexity is a matter of the subject system (quite possibly with only a limited number of parts) exhibiting emergent properties.

Complex adaptive systems are special cases of complex systems. They are complex in that they are dynamic networks of interactions and relationships not aggregations of static entities. They are adaptive in that their individual and collective behaviour changes as a result of experience

So did that help?

Thankfully whoever wrote the Wikipedia entries kindly gave some examples of complex adaptive systems. These include the stock market, social insect and ant colonies, the biosphere and the ecosystem, the brain and the immune system, the cell and the developing embryo, manufacturing businesses and any human social group-based endeavour in a cultural and social system such as political parties or communities.

There are close relationships between the field of CAS and artificial life. In both areas, the principles of emergence and self-organization are very important.

So does innovation also fit within complex adaptive systems?

If we take the suggested feature list presented on Wikipedia’s entry for complex systems (http://bit.ly/nF5F3G ) I feel innovation fits. Let’s make some comparisons and this is my attempt to quantify innovation for being a complex adaptive system in the table below. It is a work-in-progress.

Components of an innovation complex adaptive system compared.

The source for the features used for a complex adaptive system has been taken from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_adaptive_system and for the innovation complex adaptive system is my thoughts on where the feature does apply in innovation to fit.  W-I-P 09 02 2012

Do you agree, do you see other ones, or have I lost you?

Cracking the complexity code

There was a good article within the McKinsey Quarterly, published in 2007 entitled “Cracking the complexity code” written by three authors Suzanne Heywood, Jessica Spungin and David Turnbull that leads with “one view of complexity holds that it’s largely a bad thing- that simplification generally creates value by removing unnecessary costs”.

Certainly, we all yearn for a more simplified life, structure, organization, approach to systems or just reducing complexity in our daily lives to find time for what we view as improving its ‘quality’.

Within the article, they argue there are two types of complexity- institutional and individual. The former concerns itself with the interactions within the organization, the latter is the way individuals or managers deal personally with complexity.

The real important takeaway from this article is when organizations treat complexity as something they must overcome, reduce or try to ignore they miss opportunities.

Complexity, the authors argue, should be seen as a challenge to be managed, managed well, and its full potential exploited, not as a problem to be reduced or eliminated. It is through the nature of these complexities we achieve competitive advantage and can exploit more of the flow of knowledge for those new sources of new profit and wealth creation.

They suggest that organizations need to decide on where to hold complexity within any design and build the right capabilities where they matter. I would argue innovation certainly matters, and it is complex and needs to be understood as exactly that, and managed accordingly not in a piecemeal fashion.

Complexity matters in building the right processes, skills and culture but because they don’t behave in linear ways and any ‘messing’ with the complexity and relationships within this can have an awful lot of unintended consequences.

The other correlations that work for me

The late Everett Rogers offered us the diffusion of innovation, which gave us a frame to understand the process by which innovation spreads within social systems.

Complex systems are equally about relationships among the members of a system. You move into more the emergent behaviours that become increasingly adaptive in response to the environment and what interact within it.

Diffusion occurs in complex systems where networks overlap, exchange and learn. Both Diffusion and Complex Systems adapt and adopt with the endpoint of making ‘it’ into more of an ordered system.

The more you work the system, the fitter for the purpose it becomes, the more it diffuses out, the more dynamic it becomes and increasingly valuable from these interactions.

Complex adaptive systems don’t operate in equilibrium conditions

I’ve been also in a set of debates in recent days around management looking for stability, for predictably, looking to take as much complexity out of the system as possible- often sometimes labelled as ‘variance’.

This leads to enforcing business as usual as the modus operandi for innovation to ‘fit’  but we are faced with the very opposite in today’s world, the need to ’embrace’ reoccurring change.

We need to manage complexity and we do need innovation so we do need to obtain as much diversity and non-linear structure in what we do to allow diversity and all possible options. Our innovation systems are being forced ‘open’ making them even more complex and our energies will have to turn from ‘containment’ to more ‘adaptive’ and responsive ones to manage going forward.

We need to not reject complex systems we need to understand them, we need to embrace them and learn to determine what needs to be complex and what doesn’t. This requires a real ‘flow’ of different energies to maintain the organization of the system, it needs active managing. It will only become harder.

For innovation to work, to thrive, and to provide a sustaining payback, it needs to be seen as a complex adaptive system. We can’t keep hiding and pretending the ‘bits and pieces we play with and constantly fiddle with, called our innovation system, will be sufficient. We do need to understand innovation in its entirety.

We have choices of complexity

There are different types of complexity to manage. Work conducted by Julian Birkinshaw and Suzanne Heywood suggested four types of complexity. I only summarize these here.  Imposed complexity, those interventions both internally and externally that require ‘higher’ insight.

There is the inherent complexity found with any organization and presently managed through striving to be more efficient and effective.

There is designed in complexity, where innovation needs to fit more. These are choices about how, where and why an organization sets about its operation. These can be constrained, underinvested in, and even jettisoned but do have lasting consequences for the future of the organization.

This is the area of strategic consequence as these can limit competitive advantages from the level of innovation intensity chosen as an example.

The fourth is unnecessary complexity where increased misalignment resides, it is sometimes easy to recognize but often hard to let go as it sometimes makes up “the way things are run around here” and has a richness in history.

The challenge of complexity within innovation

If you can begin to identify complexity that hampers effectiveness you can begin to remove it but be really clear on the effects if the complexity part you are removing is not the route to value and often innovation, which certainly does seemingly get constrained and caught up in this often shorter-term pursuit of effectiveness for effectiveness sake and you don’t have the bandwidth for innovation exploration.

Recognize innovation is complex, recognize it does have to be handled carefully but it needs to also be fully understood for what it is, a complex adaptive system. It cannot be treated in the same way as effectiveness or efficiency can.

It needs ‘actively’ manage differently, for all the future opportunities it holds by placing the emphasis on building greater innovation capabilities to make it ‘dynamically’ work.

Otherwise, you end up with unexplained consequences to poorer performance from your innovation activities and are often at a loss to explain why.

We do need to relate more to complexity as it comes with the turf if you want really lasting innovation.

The post A recognition that innovation is a complex adaptive system first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.